Images, an observation exercise
It also helps when you get stuck in your writing
When I was teaching a poetry class to students in prison, I would often end up with writers that would write any interesting images. They leaned hard into abstractions like sad, lonely, heartbroken, etc.
It would be frustrating for me because sometimes I would get a student that had a great story to tell, seemed to get form, could nail sound, but couldn’t show you anything.
We all need images to pull from, or we need to practice in order to see and notice things around us. And here’s an exercise that you can do: take your notebook/journal and our favorite writing instrument timer and set it for 10 or 15 minutes, don’t look at your phone, sit in one place and write what you see, smell, hear, taste, and feel. Use all five senses. Look up, look down, see the small thing, big things…
Also, don’t get hung up on describing things. An orange tractor can be just that, no need in saying that it was Crayola burnt orange like the sunsets you drew in 3rd grade. It’s just an orange tractor for this exercise.
Okay, here’s mine (I just ran out this morning to do it myself): our rooster crowing, the neighbor’s rooster responding, African doves calling, worker in blue walking down the driveway, the smell of cow shit on the wind, small ants on the sidewalk, yellow flowers, grey sky.
There was more that I got more in the five minutes sitting on my front step. Will any of these make it to a poem? I don’t know, maybe I can take one or two of the images and make a poem around them? But, every time I do this, it helps me practice noticing the world around me. And that is important in art.
I had woman in the class that had been in prison for a long time. Her writing was very typically abstract and vague. Getting her to write imagery was difficult. She was a student that I had do this exercise and send me her notes.
She wrote about putting a peppermint in her prison coffee for flavor, a yellowed window in the hallway, prisoners working with rescue pit bulls to give them behavior training…
I had her unpack the peppermint in her coffee a bit more and learned that she did that because the prison coffee was so stale but strong. It was as close to having some kind of Starbucks drink as she could get. I told her that could be metaphor for loneliness, homesickness…
Unfortunately, none of these things made it into her writing and she never did improve in her use of imagery. And often, what I observe doesn’t make it into my writing always either.
But, you will have a bank of images to pull from, maybe keep a notebook dedicated to these exercises and do them once a week in different locations. And, doing this may open up a new poem to you, something you hadn’t thought of. It will also increase your power of observation, which is really important in all writing.
Grab your pen and go write! Oh, and drop your observations in the comments, let’s see what you see.
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